In college I was still reading out loud. Research papers have a voice. Mathematical equations especially. They take longer to say out loud than to read in your head, but you can never be sure what’s on the page if you don’t.
This is totally true. I am a professional mathematician, and I also have a strong “mental voice”. Whenever I read mathematical texts/research papers with equations inline, I totally read the equations aloud in my head. It makes me wonder to what extent being dyslexic for English (or other written natural languages) fails to co-occur with being dyslexic for math-tongue (as distinct from dyscalculia, with AIUI has to do mostly with disability at mental calculation and mental manipulation of quantitative facts).
Maybe that description was too minimal to help anyone recreate the effect. What you do is you pretend the roman alphabet is a foreign alphabet. E.g. Kanji. Whenever you write or read, trace every stroke of the letter like you are illuminating an ancient manuscript. Channel your inner Sumi-E brush artist. Imagine yourself a true artisan of calligraphy. It’s a bit of a semi-meditative process of noticing every single stroke of every single letter. Yes, this is excruciatingly slow at first. Yes, it will be only kind of slow eventually. But, even better, you can probably still drop this technique at will and then just switch back and forth before high and low error modes of processing languages. Also, you are likely to lower your error rate in fast mode over time cause mental skills are porous. Or maybe magic? Anyway, it does seem to cross-over a bit.
Also, I can read Korean and have had the distinct sensation of it being harder to make myself care about the differences between the characters, very early on; similarly, when practicing Chinese characters in class, I’ve seen a lot of classmates have a very hard time because they have to suddenly resort to having to treat the characters like they’re pictures without even having the mental technology of how to do that correctly, so I wonder how much of dyslexia transfers cross-linguistically! Are there people who can read Cyrillic and Greek, but not Latin script or Hebrew? Who knows!
I wonder how much of dyslexia transfers cross-linguistically
It turns out that quite a bit of it is dependent on the type of language; A person dyslexic in alphabetic languages is not necessarily dyslexic in logographic languages, because they engage different parts of the brain. For example, from this review of Chinese developmental dyslexia:
Converging behavioral evidence suggests that, while phonological and rapid automatized naming deficits are language universal, orthographic and morphological deficits are specific to the linguistic properties of Chinese. At the neural level, hypoactivation in the left superior temporal/inferior frontal regions in dyslexic children across Chinese and alphabetic languages may indicate a shared phonological processing deficit, whereas hyperactivation in the right inferior occipital/middle temporal regions and atypical activation in the left frontal areas in Chinese dyslexic children may indicate a language-specific compensatory strategy for impaired visual-spatial analysis and a morphological deficit in Chinese (developmental dyslexia), respectively.
Interesting! Thank you for sharing! I’d love to know the answer as well.
Anecdotally, I can say that I did try to learn Japanese a little, and I found Kanji far easier to learn than words in hiragana or katakana, cause relating a “picture” to a word seemed far easier for me to parse and remember than to remember “random phonetic encodings”. I’m using quotation marks to indicate my internal experience, cause I’m a little mistrustful by now if I’m even understanding how other people parse words and language.
Either way, that anecdote would point to my pictoral->meaning wiring being stronger than my phoneme-encoding->meaning wiring. Which might explain why processing language as drawings helped me. I really have no idea how much this would generalize. But I agree people must run in to this when learning new alphabets.
This is totally true. I am a professional mathematician, and I also have a strong “mental voice”. Whenever I read mathematical texts/research papers with equations inline, I totally read the equations aloud in my head. It makes me wonder to what extent being dyslexic for English (or other written natural languages) fails to co-occur with being dyslexic for math-tongue (as distinct from dyscalculia, with AIUI has to do mostly with disability at mental calculation and mental manipulation of quantitative facts).
Also, I can read Korean and have had the distinct sensation of it being harder to make myself care about the differences between the characters, very early on; similarly, when practicing Chinese characters in class, I’ve seen a lot of classmates have a very hard time because they have to suddenly resort to having to treat the characters like they’re pictures without even having the mental technology of how to do that correctly, so I wonder how much of dyslexia transfers cross-linguistically! Are there people who can read Cyrillic and Greek, but not Latin script or Hebrew? Who knows!
It turns out that quite a bit of it is dependent on the type of language; A person dyslexic in alphabetic languages is not necessarily dyslexic in logographic languages, because they engage different parts of the brain. For example, from this review of Chinese developmental dyslexia:
EDIT: replied to wrong comment. Curse you mobile interface!
Interesting! Thank you for sharing! I’d love to know the answer as well.
Anecdotally, I can say that I did try to learn Japanese a little, and I found Kanji far easier to learn than words in hiragana or katakana, cause relating a “picture” to a word seemed far easier for me to parse and remember than to remember “random phonetic encodings”. I’m using quotation marks to indicate my internal experience, cause I’m a little mistrustful by now if I’m even understanding how other people parse words and language.
Either way, that anecdote would point to my pictoral->meaning wiring being stronger than my phoneme-encoding->meaning wiring. Which might explain why processing language as drawings helped me. I really have no idea how much this would generalize. But I agree people must run in to this when learning new alphabets.